The performance of UK Weather Dependent Renewables: 2002 – 2020

And it is already happening in the UK: the “trip” of an Offshore wind farm on a breezy summer afternoon contributed to the major UK power outage of 9/8/2019. As UK Renewable penetration increases similar power outages will be all the more severe and probably longer lasting one calm foggy winter week sometime soon. In early November 2020 the UK Grid was close to failure when an anticyclone established itself across the whole of Northern Europe.…

Supernovae twins open up new possibilities for precision cosmology

Cosmologists have found a way to double the accuracy of measuring distances to supernova explosions – one of their tried-and-true tools for studying the mysterious dark energy that is making the universe expand faster and faster. The results from the Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory) collaboration, led by Greg Aldering of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), will enable scientists to study dark energy with greatly improved precision and accuracy, and provide a powerful crosscheck of the technique across vast distances and time.…